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8.9.12

Man, 75, on trial for the rape of three deaf boys

PARIS (AFP) – A 75-year-old French humanitarian worker went on trial Friday in Paris for the rapes of three deaf boys in Indonesia between 1997 and 2004.

Gerard Carayon, a longtime resident of the Javanese capital Yogyakarta, denies the charges.

Carayon headed a non-governmental organisation which helped children in distress and some of them worked at his house.

In 2004, a French diplomat in Jakarta alerted Indonesian police about suspicions that Carayon was sexually abusing children in his house or at a hotel.

A probe was launched and the boys told an Indonesian teacher they had been raped or abused and sometimes given money in exchange for sex.

Carayon, who described himself as a painter, denied the allegations in court. When the testimony of an alleged victim was read out in court that he served as a sex slave, Carayon murmured: “It’s not true.”

He was arrested at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport in 2008 while returning from Cambodia. He was released after 18 months in detention in March 2010 under a judicial review but disappeared, sparking an arrest warrant.

Carayon was then arrested in August near the Franco-Italian border and detained again.

Suspected child abuse offenders are being increasingly judged in their own countries for offences committed abroad following changes in legislation in nearly 40 countries